What Can We Learn about English from Chinese?

The Challenge of "Whole Language" Reading

Greetings newsletter readers! School has started with a sprint
here in Connecticut. I feel fortunate to be able to find time to do
this small English Plus+ newsletter. I hope those of you who are
students and teachers will have a great school year, and may
all your anguish be vanquished.

We Left Off Last Time...

Those of you who received our last newsletter may recall that I
had the opportunity of teaching English for a month in China. I
had a wonderful time with very hospitable Chinese hosts and
some highly motivated middle school English teachers. (Middle
school in China is the same as high school in the U.S.)

In the last newsletter I reflected on one significant difference
between the Chinese system and the American system and
how American schools might learn from this difference. This
time, as promised, I want to reflect on one thing that I learned
to appreciate about English from my month in China.

The Level of Studies in China

I observed a little about Chinese schools and what they
taught. I teach high schoolers mostly aged
15 to 18 years. In China, most of the classes I worked with had
students of the same age. I was able to take a look at their
English curriculum as well as some of their other curricula.

The level of the English curriculum was very similar to the level
of American French and Spanish texts. The goal in Chinese
middle schools is to have graduates who can speak English
fairly well and begin literary studies in college. That is very
similar to the goals set by most high school foreign language
curricula in the United States.

As best I could tell, the level of
science courses was also similar to that in the United States,
though China may put more emphasis on Chemistry and
Physics than many schools in the U.S. History was different
because of the obvious geographical and cultural differences;
but Chinese students seemed to have a level of knowledge of
their history commensurate with a students from a high school
that takes U.S. History seriously.

One Surprising Difference

However, there was one startling difference. The Chinese students in their Chinese classes were at a significantly lower reading level than what most American high school students read in their English and literature classes. There were poems, essays, short stories, and traditional tales, but the students seemed to take more time reading them. The level reminded me of a fifth or sixth grade reading text in the U.S. When I considered the level of study in other courses, this surprised me.

At "my" school, English was required, so most students could
speak it with some comfort. I was able to discuss these things
with students and others there. I learned why the Chinese
classes were not at a level comparable to our English classes.
One brave adult suggested that most modern Chinese writings
are shorter because of the government control of the presses.
That may be a factor, but I was thinking more about the level
and depth of the material, not the specific subject matter.

The Reason Why

The reason is more simple than that. Chinese takes a long time
to learn to read. The modern Simplified Chinese of mainland
China still has a core of 6,800 characters which a reader has to
memorize. Traditional Chinese script contains about 80,000
different characters. These characters are not phonetic, but
are pictorial or ideograms. For example, the character for "hill"
or "mountain" looks a little like and upside-down lower case "m"
with the middle stem longer than the side stems. It resembles or
carries the idea of a mountain peak. Other characters are
combinations of characters placed together in an artistic
manner. The traditional Chinese character for "boat" is made
up of the character for "vessel" or "container" and "eight" and
"men," perhaps alluding to the Ark of Noah.

Written Chinese is Essentially "See and Say"

It takes a long time to memorize all these different characters.
There is no particularly easy way to decode them. It is sheer
memorization. It is really quite impressive how much the
average middle school student in China has to memorize. But
what does this mean as far learning to read in China? It takes
much longer to learn to read in Chinese than it does in English.

By fourth grade (age nine), the average Americans who have
learned phonics have learned to decode most standard English.
If they see a familiar word, they are normally able to read it
even if they have never seen it written before. In most cases, if
they see an unfamiliar word, they can pronounce it. Children who
learn to read at home before school can attain such a level much earlier. Author Nathaniel Hawthorne read "Pilgrim's Progress" in one sitting when he was six.

Imagine English as a Ideogrammatic Language

Imagine what learning English, or another alphabetic language,
would be like if we had to learn each word by what it looked like
instead of just learning what twenty or thirty odd letters look like
and sound like? It would take far longer to learn. In a real
sense, teenagers in China have just learned to read. They are
at the same place a fourth grader would be in the U.S. It is a
good illustration of how "whole language," "see and say," "sight
reading," or whatever you want to call it, would retard the ability
of Americans to learn to read English.

I am reminded of the chapter in the American classic novel To
Kill a Mockingbird in which the six-year-old Scout tells of being
bored in school because the teacher "was waving cards at us on
which were printed 'the,' 'cat,' 'rat,' 'man,' and 'you.' No comment
seemed to be expected of us, and the class received these
impressionistic revelations in silence. I was bored, so I began a
letter to Dill [a friend]. Miss Caroline caught me writing and told
me to tell my father to stop teaching me." 1

One Advantage of Ideogrammatic Writing

It is interesting to note that in the 1970's the Chinese government
recognized that a phonetic system worked faster and attempted to
create a workable alphabetic writing system for Chinese. This
system is still in place, but is not the standard. There are two
reasons why the system was not fully adopted. First, simple
resistance. People already knew one system and had been
comfortable with it for a long time. Second, and more significant, it could not be read throughout the country. The Chinese speak three mutually unintelligible languages--Cantonese, Mandarin, and Manchu--but they all use the same characters. In addition, there are numerous minority languages in China that have adopted the characters.

Actually, the Korean and Japanese character systems
are based on Chinese, and the Chinese can read much of those
writings as well (and vice versa). The spoken languages are
quite different, but the writing is the same or similar. The
the system of characters makes it possible for disparate languages to communicate via writing. In an age of ethnic chaos in many
places, such a system brings a certain amount of unity.

Interestingly, while English does not have the character system
of China, students in English-speaking countries still spend a lot
of time in classes studying the structure native language. This is true of most other national language, too. Most written languages
have grammatical and spelling standards so that their writing
can be widely understood among various dialects. English is no
different.

For Earlier and Increased Literacy, the Phonetic Method is Superior

The lesson from observing reading in China? Alphabetic
language and phonics works best for learning how to read in the
shortest time. This can mean a higher level of reading in a shorter
amount of time. Young Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird had a right to complain about whole word recognition teaching techniques.

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Once again, may you have a great autumn, and may all your
anguish be vanquished,